WHEN PRESENCE BECOMES UNBEARABLE: THE ANGUISH THAT LEADERSHIP AVOIDS SEO

Yesterday, I published a text titled “The Illusion of Strategic Presence,” in which I discuss a truth rarely admitted in high-level boardrooms: genuine presence is terrifying. Not merely challenging, nor simply uncomfortable—terrifying in the strictest sense of the term.
Contemporary corporate architecture, with its exaltation of multitasking and its cult of hyperconnectivity, is no accident. It constitutes a sophisticated defensive system, carefully structured to avoid something few executives dare to name: the existential anguish of being truly present. In other words, for many, genuine presence is not a virtue. It is a threat.
When you are fully present—without the protection of the next meeting, without the shield of a congested agenda, without the anesthesia of attentional dispersion—something brutal occurs: you become inexcusably responsible. Not for the decision that will be made, but for the totality of what is happening in that moment. Every unspoken word you notice. Every tension crossing the room. Every inconsistency between discourse and affect. Every possibility that opens up and that you choose—or do not choose—to explore.
Existential philosophy already knew this: absolute freedom is unbearable. When there are no more alibis—“I was distracted,” “I didn’t notice,” “I had other priorities”—you are confronted with the devastating weight of unmitigated responsibility. Being present means accepting that you are what you choose to do with what is happening. Not tomorrow, not in the next strategic round, but now, in this irrecoverable instant.
And here lies the first defensive mechanism that corporate culture generously offers: fragmentation as cognitive anesthesia. If you are simultaneously in this meeting, replying to that email, thinking about the upcoming presentation, anticipating the call with the board—you are never truly anywhere. And if you are not truly present, you cannot be truly responsible. Dispersion becomes a metabolized alibi, an embodied excuse, an institutionalized protection against confronting the radicality of the present moment.
Observe the perverse elegance of this arrangement: the same culture that exalts “executive presence” creates the structural conditions that make it impossible. Agendas with no interval between commitments. Expectations of immediate response that preclude deep processing. Performance metrics that reward volume over density. It is like demanding that someone dive deeply while dragging them across the surface of the water.
But something even more disturbing operates between the lines: the implicit narcissistic contract of modern leadership. Many executives have built their professional identity on a specific fantasy—the fantasy of omnipresence, of indispensability, of superhuman capacity to be everywhere at once. This fantasy is not mere inflated ego; it is a psychic structure that organizes one’s sense of self-worth.
Relinquishing this fantasy—choosing to be deeply present in one place, which necessarily means accepting that you are not in others—implies a work of mourning. Mourning for the self-image as an exceptional leader who transcends human limitations. Mourning for the illusion of total control. Mourning for the protection that dispersion offered against confronting one’s own finitude.
Because being truly present in one context is accepting that you are a limited human being, incapable of inhabiting simultaneities, obliged to choose and, therefore, obliged to renounce. Every moment of genuine presence is also a moment of renunciation of all the other places you could be. And this renunciation, for those who structured their identity on the fantasy of omnipresence, is experienced as an existential threat.
Here lies the cruel paradox: the same presence that would radically increase leadership effectiveness is the one that most threatens the self-image on which many leaders have built their sense of worth. It is safer to be in five places superficially than in one place deeply, because superficiality protects against perceiving one’s own limitation.
And there is yet another layer: genuine presence destroys comfortable cognitive hierarchies. When you are truly present, you can no longer hide behind the role, the title, the position. You are forced to encounter the other—collaborator, peer, subordinate—as another human being, not as an organizational function. And this genuine encounter, stripped of protective hierarchy, is risky. It demands vulnerability. It demands that you be affected. It demands that you change.
Multitasking, then, is not merely poor attention management. It is an active refusal of encounter. It is the maintenance of safe distance. It is the preservation of asymmetry that protects against the transformative reciprocity that every genuine encounter implies. Because when you are truly present, you do not merely observe—you are observed. You do not merely listen—you are listened to. You do not merely perceive—you are perceived. And this means losing control over the narrative you have constructed about yourself.
Organizations know this, even if they do not say it. That is why they create cultures where absence is the norm and presence is subversion. That is why they celebrate the “ability to handle multiple priorities” while penalizing those who dare to say, “I need time to think deeply about this.” That is why they turn fragmentation into virtue—because fragmentation protects everyone from the discomfort of real encounter.
But here is what no one warns you about: this protection has a price. The price is the atrophy of subtle perceptual capacity. The price is the loss of access to the kind of intelligence that only emerges when you inhabit complex situations long enough for deep patterns to reveal themselves. The price is the gradual erosion of genuine discernment, replaced by the mechanical application of frameworks and methodologies that promise decisions without the anguish of deciding.
Because truly deciding—not executing decision procedures, but deciding in the existential sense—requires total presence. It requires that you be there with everything you are, including your doubts, your limitations, your ignorance about the future. And this is unbearable for those who structured their executive identity on the fantasy of absolute control.
True strategic presence is not a corporate mindfulness technique. It is not deep breathing before difficult meetings. It is an ontological choice: the decision to inhabit your own finitude, to accept that you are a human being dealing with complexity that exceeds your capacity for control, to renounce the protection that dispersion offers against the anguish of absolute responsibility.
And this choice has radical consequences. When you stop using fragmentation as anesthesia, you begin to feel. To feel the tension in that room that everyone pretends not to notice. To feel the incoherence in that discourse that sounds perfectly rational yet ignores uncomfortable realities. To feel the fear, ambition, hope circulating in the subtext of every interaction—and that only reveal themselves to those who are genuinely attentive.
But feeling is dangerous. Feeling transforms you. Feeling obliges you to respond in ways that may destabilize comfortable arrangements. That is why corporate culture prefers leaders who appear present but who, in truth, are protected by the armor of strategic dispersion.
So we arrive at the most uncomfortable question: what if your fragmentation is not failure, but unconscious choice? What if your impossible agenda, your multiple simultaneities, your chronic inability to be fully in one place are not career accidents, but a sophisticated defensive architecture against something you do not wish to face?
Against the anguish of realizing that, when you are truly present, you can no longer pretend not to know. You can no longer hide behind “I didn’t have time to process this.” You can no longer dilute responsibility in the comfortable fog of cognitive overload.
Genuine presence confronts you with unmitigated choices. And truly choosing—truly choosing—means accepting that you could have chosen differently, that other possibilities were sacrificed, that you are responsible not only for what you did, but for what you failed to do by doing what you did.
This is the anguish that modern leadership was designed to avoid. And multitasking is its most refined instrument.
But there is one final, devastating irony: by avoiding the anguish of presence, you condemn yourself to the anguish of superficiality. By refusing confrontation with radical responsibility, you sentence yourself to the persistent feeling that, despite all the doing, nothing essential is being touched. Despite all the meetings, no genuine encounter has occurred. Despite all the decisions, no real choice has been made.
And then you realize—or you do not realize, and that is the tragedy—that the protection has become prison. The dispersion that was supposed to shield you from the anguish of presence now condemns you to the anguish of absence. You are everywhere and nowhere. You lead everything and inhabit nothing. You decide without choosing, act without affecting, exist without presence.
The question that pierces all defenses: what exactly is your fragmentation protecting you from? And is it worth what you are sacrificing to maintain that protection?
Would you like to explore what it means to lead from genuine presence, even when it is terrifying? Visit my blog for hundreds of reflections on cognitive-behavioral development, leadership that confronts its own anguish, and transformation that begins when sophisticated defenses are recognized for what they are.

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